Curran stirred some sugar into his coffee. “Say that again.”
Lauren’s eyes sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight that streamed through the windows of the coffee shop cum bookstore on Newbury Street, a spit away from the secret library. Around their small table, shelves packed with used and new paperbacks leaned in on them.
“A Soul Eater.”
Curran sighed and tried to ignore Lauren’s beauty and remind himself she was going to become a nun. He didn’t succeed. “Listen, I know you did a lot of work here.”
He could see the frown already creeping across her face. “But?”
Curran took a sip of his coffee. “I don’t know if I’m all the ready to accept a supernatural reason as being the cause of all these deaths. I mean, in all likelihood, it’s probably some nut case who’s just figured out a nifty trick of killing people off.”
“Steve, you asked for my help. I'm telling you what I found.”
“Yeah, but this…” He paused. “Do you really buy it?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“We’re living in the 21st century for one thing. A Soul Eater sounds more like it belongs in some sword and sorcery epic movie or something.” Curran could see his fellow detectives laughing their asses off when he tried to tell them there was a servant of the Devil at work in Boston.
Lauren looked down at her coffee. “I don’t have a problem accepting ideas based solely on faith.” She looked up. “Do you?”
Curran chewed his lip. “Yeah, I do.”
“Your lack of belief doesn’t mean this guy will go away, though. Does it?”
Not with my luck, thought Curran. “What did this book say it could do?”
“Eat a person's soul.”
“And there are recorded instances of this in Church history?”
“Yes. And the method of death fits with what you’ve described as happening with all these cases. The Soul Eater is somehow able to steal the life essence away from the people he touches.”
“But why?”
Lauren shrugged. “I don't know. What I read in the book didn’t make mention of the reasons for its existence.” She rummaged in her purse and brought out the red notebook. “But someone had penciled someone’s name into the margin. Even though it had been erased, I was able to make it out: ‘Graham Westerly, 1907.’”
“What do you think it means?”
“Maybe he was some sort of expert on Soul Eaters.”
“Great. I guess we’re a little late to interview him, huh?”
“He might have passed his information on to someone else in the Church. The old nun I told you about seemed to have a lot of information.”
“Can you find her again?” Curran didn’t think it would yield much, but he didn’t want to entirely discourage Lauren, either. He liked having her around.
“That shouldn’t be a problem.” She sipped her coffee. “Did you make any headway on the case today?”
“As a matter of fact, I hit on a connection. Finally.”
“What is it?”
“Evil.”
Lauren eyed him. “What?”
“They were all evil.”
“Who?”
“The victims of this…Soul Eater guy. Each one of them had rap sheets a mile long. All bad seeds, the bunch of ‘em. Each one was a certifiable-”
“Grade A Scum bag?”
Curran smiled. “Exactly.”
Lauren smiled. “How come you didn't figure this out before?”
“Honestly? Probably because we're so used to having murder victims that are good people, not bad. Certainly not in a serial murder case. Like I said, most of those cases came at me pretty quick all those years back. Plus, there’s the fact that I was so close to the case, so absorbed by it, that I probably couldn’t see the most obvious thing in front of me. Sometimes we look too hard for the solution when it’s staring us in the face.”
“Are you sure they were all evil?”
“Well, the cases I had at the Bureau all were. And your brother was a pretty rotten egg-” He winced. “Sorry.”
Lauren waved him off. “Forget about it. You're right.” Even so, Curran saw her eyes mist over slightly. They cleared quickly and Lauren looked at him again. “So, now what?”
“I need to see if there are other outstanding unsolved murder cases anywhere else in the country. Since I wasn't with the Bureau for close to five years, there's a good chance our boy has been busy elsewhere.”
“Will that be easy to track down?”
Curran nodded. “It might be. All I'll have to do is put out a request for information. We'll see what comes back. For all we know this guy could have been criss-crossing the country offing people and we weren’t even aware of it.”
“I think there's a pretty strong chance that's what been happening.”
She seemed strangely confident. “Oh? What makes you say that?”
She frowned. “I'm not really sure. I just have a feeling.”
Curran cocked an eyebrow. “A feeling?”
“Don’t make fun of me on this, Steve. I swear I’ll walk out that door if you do.”
Curran held up his right hand. “Promise.”
“Besides, there’s nothing weird about a feeling. Haven’t you ever had them before? Like a sense of premonition?”
“As much as I hate to admit it, I have.” He took a sip of his coffee and paused to wipe his mouth. “I’d graduated from Quantico and got shipped out to Montana. Lot of times, they do that with new agents. Get them acclimated at a less-busy field office. After a year or two there, they get bumped up to a busy office like LA or New York.”
“What happened in Montana?”
“One time, me and this other guy were working late. We’d had a rash of bank robberies across the state. Nothing too serious, but enough to get concerned about.” Curran took another sip. “So, the phone rings. Turns out some guy has a tip for us. It'd been happening a lot. A bank would get robbed, we'd ask for the public's help. Tips would come in and we'd go out following up on them. Got so we pretty much thought they were all dead-ends. Nothing ever panned out.
“But this one time, this one evening for some reason it felt different. I can’t describe it.”
“What did you do?”
“We drove out. This was in January. State was frozen. All sorts of howling wind. Chest-high snowdrifts. The kind of snow that comes at you sideways and manages to get itself down your collar, in your boots, everywhere. And it was cold. You know the kind of cold where your breath comes out in huff of steam and then freezes? This was worse.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been that cold,” said Lauren.
“Yeah, it’s not the greatest sensation. Anyway, I made sure I took a vest along, one for me and one for my partner. Outside the house where these guys were supposed to be holing up, I put the armor on, the feeling was getting a lot stronger then. I told my partner to put his on, too.”
“Did he?”
Curran saw the scene again in his mind. The snow. The howl of wind. The purr of the car engine. Even the heat streaming out of the vents. “Uh uh. Said we'd be back at the office in no time and he didn't want to waste time slapping a bulky vest on. Said he thought it would turn out to be another bad tip. I tried to insist but he was adamant.
“So we made our approach. I took the back and he said he'd flush the front. I worked my way around back, trudging through the snow, getting all wet and uncomfortable. Really sucked being out in that weather.” He took a sip of the coffee trying to push out the memory of the cold. “I could hear my partner out front knocking on the door, identifying himself.”
“Did they come out?”
“They shot him through the front door with a single shotgun blast.”
Lauren didn’t say anything. She just sat there with wide eyes.
“Took him right off his feet and tossed him back down the steps. He bled out pretty fast, having the front of his chest cavity ripped open like that.”
“Did you get the guys?”
Curran looked away. “Two of them. Yeah.”
“Did they stand trial?”
“They never got that far.”
Curran watched Lauren stop breathing. After a minute of staring at her, she exhaled slowly. She said nothing.
“So,” continued Curran. “To answer your question, yes, I have felt a sense of premonition before and that was it. I somehow knew there was going to be trouble that day. Luckily, I listened to it. That could have just as easily been me taking that shotgun blast in the chest.”
Lauren finished her coffee. “Steve…I…I felt something earlier today when I was researching the Soul Eater.”
“Felt something? Like what?”
“A presence in the library with me while I was reading.”
“You mean like a ghost?”
“Possibly. But I don't think so. It felt different than a ghost.”
Curran eyed her. “You've felt ghosts before?”
“Yes.”
I’m not going to touch that one, thought Curran. “Okay. Tell me about it.”
“The library seemed to close in on me. But at the same time there was a breeze. It made my hair stand on end. It flipped the pages of the book I was reading until the chapter about Soul Eaters came up. Later on, it got incredibly cold in the room but I started sweating. I suddenly felt like someone was there with me.”
“Could it have been another person in the library with you?”
“I thought of that, too, but it wasn't. The only other person there was an old nun. And she was far too busy studying to have been it. But Steve…something else was in there with me.”
“You think it was this Soul Eater guy?”
Lauren shook her head. “I doubt it. I don’t think his power extends to invisibility. But something, some kind of presence, was in that room.”
“And you think it’s related?”
“I think so. I heard something that sounded like a voice.”
Curran stopped drinking his coffee. “Did you say a voice?”
“Yes.”
“What did it say?”
Lauren looked away. “Don’t think me foolish. But it sounded like it said ‘soon.’”
Curran’s heart jumped. Could it be that she heard the same thing Curran heard in his dreams? He frowned. Ridiculous. They were just dreams. Weren’t they?
“Steve?”
He snapped back to reality. “Yeah?”
“You look concerned. Everything all right?”
A buzzing on his left hip made him jump. The cell phone. He exhaled and grabbed it. “Yeah?”
What he heard didn’t make him feel any better. He hung up and got to his feet.
Lauren stood. “Steve, what is it?”
“We’ll have to continue this some other time.”
“Why?”
“They just found another body. Looks like the Soul Eater — whatever we end up calling him — has struck again.”